Time and a Starry Night

She remembers her little sister as a tease, a sprite, a best friend, a glow of light dancing in her memories. She sees her on a starry night in August and hears her whisper, “I’m leaving.” And then the Nazis come.

For Rose Toren, the imagery is as clear as if it happened yesterday instead of almost 60 years ago. Time has a way of capturing and holding significant moments, imprinting them on the brain like a face on film.

The face in this case is that of Eda Orenstein. She was 12 when the Nazis spread out through the little town in Poland in which the family of seven lived. There was Rose, two years older than Eda, two other sisters, a brother and her parents.

The Germans were rounding up Jews and they found the Orenstein family in Strzyzow, near Lublin.

“They took us into a field,” Toren said as we sat over coffee in her small Beverly Hills home. “It was a warm night, so gorgeous. We didn’t know what would happen to us but we expected the worst. The Nazis were to come back in the morning.”

Because they were close, it was Rose in whom Eda confided. “She said she wasn’t going to wait for the bad people to come for her. She was going to run away. She said goodbye and that was the last I ever saw of her.”

Eda Orenstein, like a leaf in a gale, had disappeared into time and the starry night.

*

The moment rests uneasily on Rose Toren’s memory. Like so many others who lost families in the horror of the Holocaust, she seeks closure. She wants to know specifically what happened to her little sister.

“I’m hoping against hope she’s still alive,” Toren said. “If she is, I’ll find her.”

Toren’s own story is a saga of peril. After Eda ran away, the family took refuge in a barn. Rose’s father told her to save herself and she fled to the home of a friend who helped her obtain papers that identified her as a displaced Polish Christian.

She maintained that identity even when named by an informer as a Jew and imprisoned in Auschwitz. Only Nazi uncertainty saved her from the gas chamber. She escaped from Auschwitz days before its liberation.

Searching for her family after the war, she discovered that her mother and third sister had died in a concentration camp, but she could find no evidence of what happened to the others.

Toren left Poland, moved to the United States and married, but always there was the need to know about her remaining family. In 1985, she returned to her hometown but could still find no trace of them. She did, however, discover the grave of the friend whose father had helped her survive.

“I cleaned it and arranged for a headstone that just said it came from Rose,” Toren said, her voice choking slightly. “I couldn’t say she saved the life of a Jew because even now they might desecrate the grave.”

The home where she’d been raised was gone. “The whole neighborhood had just disappeared. Only a sugar mill remains from the old days.” She shook her head in mock incredulity. “A sugar mill. . . .”

*

Toren’s husband died in 1993. In the intervening years, she wrote two books, “Destiny” and, more recently, “A New Beginning.” They keep a promise to her father who, as they hugged goodbye, asked her to someday tell the story of their travail.

Then last summer Toren returned to Poland, still seeking closure. By endlessly asking questions throughout the area of their home, she found a woman who, tragically, could at least put part of Toren’s search to rest.

“She knew the family and remembered seeing the Nazis come for my father, my brother and my other sister,” Toren said, pausing between sentences to compose herself. “She thinks Poles told the Germans where they were hiding. They took them to a street near a field. . . .” She stopped, closed her eyes and: “They shot them. They murdered them all.”

Where they were buried, no one seemed to know. “I would like to dig, dig, dig until I find them and bring their remains back here,” Toren said. “But maybe it’s too late and too much and too heartbreaking.”

The fate of her sister is Rose Toren’s final unknown from that period of Nazi terror. Many are helping in the search to find her. Toren is already planning another trip to Poland to continue her part of the quest.

“Eda was outgoing, smart and pretty, like my mother, beautiful enough to be a model,” she said. “Maybe she married and has a different name. I have a strong feeling she’s still alive, and I tell you again I will find her.”

No photographs of Eda Orenstein exist, only memory’s face of a little girl who vanished into time and a starry summer night in a world that existed many, many years ago.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com